What are the characteristics of the woodpecker?

Characteristics of the woodpecker

It has a strong beak, long tongue, and hard tail. It lives in the forest and likes to peck wood and catch insects on big trees;

Birds of this family The head is also large, but the neck is long, the mouth is strong and straight, chisel-shaped, and the nostrils are exposed; the angiohyoid bone extends into a ring shape, with both sides passing from the throat around the occiput to the base of the upper mouth. The tongue is long and retractable, with short hooks at the tip; the legs are slightly shorter, with 3 or 4 toes; there are 9 primary flight feathers. The skull is lizard-palatate, with the hoe bone replaced by some paired bone fragments. The jaw and palatine bones are small and far away from both sides. There are 2 notches on each side of the rear end of the sternum, and the sternal manubrium is bifurcated. The leg muscles lack perineal muscles and accessory femorocaudal muscles; the tail is flat or wedge-shaped, with mostly 12 tail feathers. The feather shafts are hard and elastic, supporting the body when pecking wood. The most common woodpeckers are the green woodpecker and the spotted woodpecker.

The body feathers of the green woodpecker are mainly green, and the underparts are gray with green stains. The top of the male bird's head is red, very bright. The Spotted Woodpecker is slightly smaller, with white spots on a black upper body, mostly on the wings, brownish-white underparts, red under the tail, and the back of the male's head is also red. There is also a smaller woodpecker called the ant hawk, which is also relatively common. Its feather color is quite special. Its upper body is a light silvery gray background, densely covered with dark brown markings, like snake skin patterns, and its lower body is almost white. It cannot climb trees, nor does it peck wood to catch insects, but it forages for ants on the ground, so it is also called the ground woodpecker. The role of woodpeckers

In the woods, sometimes people will hear the sound of "tap, thunk, thunk". If you tiptoe forward and hold your breath, you will find that this is the forest doctor and the woodpecker at work.

The woodpecker has a natural scalpel, which is a bill like a steel chisel. It has been passed down from generation to generation and lives by eating insects. When it stops on the tree, it raises the scalpel and pecks east and west. From the sound of tapping the trunk, it knows the part where the pest is lurking, and then pecks a small hole in the tree and removes it. The long and slender tongue goes in and uses the mucus and small hooks on it to hook out the bugs and eat them. Although the pests are hidden deep in the tree trunks, once discovered by the woodpecker, there is no way to escape.

According to surveys and research, woodpeckers are diligent and never lazy, knocking on tree trunks 500-600 times every day. In recent years, someone has calculated through high-speed photography that the impact speed of a woodpecker when pecking a tree is 2,080 kilometers per hour; when the woodpecker's head bounces back from the tree, the impact of its deceleration is also astonishing; there is about 1,000 g-forces constant.

You know, if a car hits a brick wall at a speed of 56 kilometers per hour, its force is only 10 gravity constants. As you can imagine, 1,000 gravity constants is such a huge impact! The strange thing is that woodpeckers never get concussions from this, nor do they suffer any damage to their heads and necks. Living habits of woodpeckers

Woodpeckers have extremely superb insect-catching skills. Its beak is strong and pointed. It can not only peck open bark, but also hard wood parts, much like a chisel used by carpenters. Its tongue is slender and soft, and can stick out of the mouth for a long time. It also has a pair of very long hyoid horn bones, which surround the outside of the skull and act as a special spring. The flexion of the hyoid bone horns can make the tongue It is retractable and has a horny tip with rows of barbed hooks and mucus, making it very suitable for hooking insects and larvae on tree trunks. They tap the trunk with their mouths, making a clicking sound in the quiet forest. If they find insects somewhere on the trunk, they cling tightly to the tree, with their head and mouth almost perpendicular to the trunk, and first remove the bark from the tree. Peck it open, hook the pests out one by one with your tongue and eat them, and stick out the eggs with mucus.

When it encounters insects hiding in the passages deep in the trunk, it will also use the ingenious trick of "beating drums to repel insects", tapping the passages with its mouth to emit a special sound that makes the pests fearful. The sound of drumming makes pests dizzy and move around under the stimulation of sound waves. They often try to escape from the hole, but they happen to be caught and eaten by the woodpeckers waiting here. They usually have to completely eliminate the cysticercids in the entire tree before moving to another tree. When they encounter a tree with severe insect infestation, they will work on this tree for several days until all the pests are eliminated.